“So what about Mars? What about our war? Hell, what is our war?”
“It’s a bloodydamn mess is what it is,” Sevro says. “It spilled over into open war about eight months ago. The Sons have stayed tight. Don’t know where Orion is. Dead, we reckon. The Pax and your ships are gone. And now we’ve got paramilitary armies that aren’t Sons-affiliated rising up in the north, massacring civilians and in turn getting wiped out by Legion airborne units. Then there’s mass strikes and protests in dozens of cities. The prisons are overflowing with political prisoners, so they’re relocating them to these makeshift camps where we know for a fact that they are pullin’ mass executions.”
Dancer pulls up some of the holos, so I see blurry images of what look like large prisons in the
desert and forest. They zoom in on lowColors disembarking transports at gunpoint and filing into the concrete structures. It switches to a view of rubble-strewn streets. Men with masks and Red armbands firing over the smoking remains of city trams. A Gold lands among them. The image cuts out.
“We been hitting them hard as we can,” Sevro says. “Gotten some hardcore business done. Stole a
dozen ships, two destroyers. Demolished the Thermic Command Center…”
“And now they’re rebuilding it,” Dancer says.
“Then we’ll destroy it again,” Sevro snaps.
“When we can’t even hold a city?”
“These Reds are not warriors.” Ragnar interrupts the two. “They can fly ships. Shoot guns. Lay bombs. Fight Grays. But when a Gold arrives, they melt away.”
A deep silence follows his words. The Sons of Ares are guerilla fighters. Saboteurs. Spies. But in this war, Lorn’s words haunt me. “How do sheep kill a lion? By drowning him in blood.”
“Every civilian death on Mars is blamed on us,” Theodora says eventually. “We kill two in a bombing of a munitions manufacturing plant, they say we killed a thousand. Every strike or demonstration, Society agents infiltrate the crowd masquerading as demonstrators to shoot at Gray officers or detonate suicide vests. Those images are dispersed to the media circus. And when the cameras are off, Grays break into homes and make sympathizers disappear. MidColors. LowColor.
Doesn’t matter. They contain the dissent. In the north, like Sevro said, it’s open rebellion.”
“A faction called Red Legion is massacring every highColor they find,” Dancer says darkly. “Old
friend of ours has joined their leadership. Harmony.”
“Fitting.”
“She’s poisoned them against us. They won’t take our orders, and we’ve stopped sending them
weapons. We’re losing our moral high ground.”
“The man with voice and violence controls the world,” I murmur.
“Arcos?” Theodora asks. I nod. “If only he were here.”
“I’m not sure he’d help us.”
“Lamentably, it seems as if voice doesn’t exist without violence,” the Pink says. She folds a leg over the other. “The greatest weapon a rebellion has is its spiritus. The spirit of change. That little seed that finds a hope in the mind and flourishes and spreads. But the ability to plant that idea, and even the idea itself has been taken from us. The message stolen. We are voiceless.”
When she speaks, the others listen. Not to humor her like Golds would, but as if her position was
nearly equal to Dancer ’s.
“None of this makes any sense,” I say. “What sparked open war? The Jackal didn’t publicize killing Fitchner. He would have wanted it quiet as he purged the Sons. What was the catalyst? And also, you say we’re voiceless. But Fitchner had a communication network that could broadcast to the mines, to anywhere. He pushed Eo’s death to the masses. Made her the face of the Rising. Did the Jackal take it out?” I look around at their concerned faces. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“You didn’t tell him already?” Sevro asks. “The hell were you doing when I was gone, picking your asses?”
“Darrow wanted to be with his family,” Dancer says sharply. He turns to me with a sigh. “Much of
our digital network was destroyed during the Jackal’s purges in the month after Ares was killed and you were captured. Sevro was able to warn us before the Jackal’s men hit our base in Agea. We went to ground, saved materiel, but lost massive amounts of manpower. Thousands of Sons. Trained operators. The next three months we spent trying to find you. We hijacked a transport going to Luna, but you weren’t on it. We searched the prisons. Issued bribes. But you’d disappeared, like you never existed. And then the Jackal executed you on the steps of the citadel in Agea.”
“I know all this.”
“Well, what you don’t know is what Sevro did next.”
I look to my friend. “What did you do?”
“What I had to.” He takes control of the hologram and wipes Jupiter away, replacing it with me.